


When the Water and Ice Forgave

by faeyrearcherons



Category: The Grisha Trilogy - Leigh Bardugo, The Language of Thorns - Leigh Bardugo
Genre: F/F, Gen, Post-Book 3: Ruin and Rising, small references to six of crows
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-28
Updated: 2020-06-28
Packaged: 2021-03-04 01:08:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,919
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24955078
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/faeyrearcherons/pseuds/faeyrearcherons
Summary: Alina goes to Ulla to wish for her powers back.
Comments: 3
Kudos: 14





	When the Water and Ice Forgave

Every morning she had awoken to a boy’s arms around her and every night he would whisper sweet nothings. _Beautiful. Beloved. Cherished. My heart._ When their passions reached to a climax, they moaned each other’s names – their true names – the ones they had to give up long ago.

They lived an ordinary life, full of ordinary things. Midday picnics at the meadow in the heat of the summer sun and ice skating in depths of winter were enough to keep her happy. Her husband and the orphanage they jointly ran was enough to make her happy. She would give those orphans a loving childhood like the one she never had.

At least that was what the girl told herself before.

Before the Queen’s Lady Plague. One merchant ship brought the disease to the port city of Os Kervo in West Ravka. By the time King Nikolai acknowledged the existence of the plague it was too late, it had already spread throughout all the port cities in Ravka.

In six weeks, it spread to the Capital and in six months it spread to a tiny, isolated orphanage by the southern border. Death discriminated between the sinners and saints, grisha and non-grisha and the young and old. Not a single day went by when the girl and the boy did not have to bury one body.

The heaviest coffins were the smallest. It was not good for the grisha children to see so much death and trauma, so they were sent to the Little Palace indefinitely.

One day, the boy woke up coughing up blood and shaking in cold sweats. She knew. Saints, she knew what was going to happen.

The girl remembered that day clearly, the day the Healer told her there was nothing she could do. Both Tolya and Tamar had seen Mal the day he died, as had David and Nadia, though Genya, Zoya and Nikolai had been away in Ketterdam at the time. 

On his deathbed his last words were _I’ll meet you in the meadow._

After Mal’s death, the girl had fled. All non-grisha children in Keramzin were dead, and the grisha children were better off at the Little Palace.

The girl traveled with the Suli for a while when she came across an old man stuck between a boulder. That man told her many things and she suspected he was much older than he seemed. Ancient. There was something vaguely familiar and comforting about him.

When she told him about Mal, he said “the first one is always the hardest.”

“The first?”

“The first one you love who dies,” the old man explained, “It gets easier after that.”

The girl could think of no reply.

Quickly she figured out his aversion to religion. The Suli were a deeply superstitious people and the old man would not hide his disgust whenever they prayed to the Saints.

Once, a Suli woman named Asha was praying to Sankt Ilya for the safe return of a lost cousin when the old man simply got up and walked away. He did not come back to the campfire for the rest of the night.

He was eccentric, but he was also a genius. She gleaned he was a seasoned traveler and well-versed in philosophy and the small sciences by his quirky comments under his breath. He kept to himself, but he never bothered anyone either.

When she was drawing in a mountainous field on a lazy afternoon, he snuck up on her with a barrage of observations. “Your hair is white,” he said.

“It is.”

‘You’re too young to have white hair. How did it get that way?”

“Stress and childbirth,” the girl replied easily. It was her go-to response, many peasant girls aged before their time. A girl with white hair and a few wrinkles would not be too unusual of a sight.

“I don’t care for your bullshit and I hate pretenses. You’re an _otkazat’sya_ but you stink of _merzost._ You seem like grisha, yet you’re powerless. In my thousand years, I’ve never seen anything like it,” his voice was full of wonder.

The girl’s hand on the sketchbook stilled.

“I never intended for you to be my experiment. If you are who I think you are,” the old man got down into a _kowtow,_ “then I am truly sorry what happened to you.”

He glanced up at her, eyes determined, “It was meant for me. I was lonely in the world and wanted to create more people like me,” his head drooped, “it was meant to _share,_ not to take away everything. My greatest shame.”

The girl understood everything. Morozova’s amplifiers succeed and failed. “Is that why you’re still alive? For redemption?”

The man shook his head. “I am nearly one thousand years old. I can no longer feel love or hatred, people are meaningless voids to me because they are all ashes, even you. What’s the point of investing your love or hatred to someone who may deserves it if they will only be one more body to mourn?”

“Then why don’t you end it all?” she pressed on.

“There is still one thing I do feel: fear. Fear of what happens after death. No experiment can recreate that experience.”

That would’ve been her fate too, if only…

“Let me make amends. I can help you get your power back.”

It was the words the girl had wanted to hear for so long, yet she couldn’t cling to this man who was once Ilya Morozova.

“At what cost?”

That afternoon in a mountain range between Ravka and Shu Han with scattered Suli travelers, an ancient man told a story.

It was a familiar tale, one that a stern-faced woman told her long ago, when the girl was just a girl with no titles or churches to her name.

According to Ana Kuya’s stories, the _sildroher_ were creatures of pure magic. Their songs could bring a good harvest or cause a storm.

Any human who caught the eye of a _sildroher_ would find themselves slowly lured to the shore by their lulling, soothing voices. Sometimes the _sildroher_ forgot that humans couldn’t breathe underwater and their beloved would drown. Bereft, they would swim towards the shores once more.

The man who was once Morozva told her that like many tales, there was always a grain of truth. The _sildroher_ incredibly powerful beings whose magic is pure and uncorrupted of _merzost._

However, like many magical creatures, they were reduced by people seeking to exploit their power. Something the girl knew all too well.

Some nations were better than other for magical creatures to survive. Ravka and Novyi Zem mostly regulated them to myth. Shu Han treated them with indifference. Fjerda annihilated everything they saw as unnatural.

She stayed with the man all night as he told his tale, until the embers of the campfire died out. When she woke up the next morning he was gone.

On her last days with the Suli, Asha and the others she befriended kissed her cheeks in farewell. They insisted on accompanying her as far as their northernmost caravan route to Arkesk.

Asha gave her blonde hair dye to pass as Fjerdan at first glance. A boy named Hanzi gave her a meal kit that should keep her fed for a few days. A beautiful matronly woman named Padma gifted her a crystal dagger with a human jawbone as the hilt.

_All you need is a full belly, an open road, and an easy heart._

The sea whip was not the only creature who lurked in the seas. Except this time the girl was not here to kill for an amplifier.

She traveled to northern Fjerda for an old wish, an ancient want she thought she had buried deep inside. She was once a girl, then a soldier, became a saint and was almost a queen, until she became a girl once again.

Fjerda was a beautiful country, she admitted to herself. The mountain peaks had the tips of the purest white snow. Village homes were painted in bright hues of reds, blues, and greens, as if in defiance of the perpetual white snow.

Even the people were very warm and hospitable. Fjerdan families had a strict code of _gästfrihet,_ or the idea that their honor was linked towards their hospitality. To never deny a stranger in need regardless of their social status.

If they were fellow Fjerans. And a ‘natural’ Fjerdan at that.

Thanks to Asha’s dye, the girl could pass as half-Fjerdan, half-Shu. Ravkan relations were a bit estranged, every village inn she stayed in cursed King Nikolai’s name. _The Famine King_ they called him. In Ravka it was called the Queen Lady’s Plague after the Kerch ship that had the first cases _,_ in Fjerda they called it the King’s Curse.

Through these families she listened to legends and tales of sea peoples. When Water Sang Fire. When the Water and Ice Forgave. There were many variants, but they all had the same themes: friendship, unrequited love, betrayal, and an aversion to those deemed ‘unnatural.’

As she travelled deeper into the north, the villages became fewer and far between. She used everything she learned from her late husband to survive. How to hunt game, how to make a fire and how to conserve heat in a bitter cold.

The cold seeped into her skin and sucked out the warmth of every breath she took. Eventually she lost track of time. The girl could not remember if it had been a few weeks, months, or years since she last spoke to another human being.

In her delirium she could only see a vast sea of white snow. No coast in sight. What if Morozova was wrong yet again? What if there was no sea witch? If only Baghra could see her now, one more foolish decision to add to her tab.

Idly walking in absentmindedness, she did not notice she was close to the black cliffs until she heard the seagulls. The girl stilled. She walked faster and faster until she was sprinting and reached its edges.

It was exactly as the old man had described. At a peninsula between Kenst Hjerte there were these supposed black and jagged cliffs where the sun created bright dawns of purple and dark dusks of pink. Where the sea foam looked like diamonds and the oceans blue as a summer sky.

That’s how she would know it was a place where the _sildroher_ still existed.

With the last bit of money left, she hired a local to take her to the small island with a grey beach. She took his catch of the day to ensure he’d be waiting for her return. The man had a wedding ring on his finger, mostly like has a family to feed. He couldn’t leave without his catch, or his sailing knots.

The girl made her way to the circle of rocks. The land inside the circle was covered in green grass and even the air was warmer where her fur coats were no longer necessary. In the middle was a blue tide pool.

Out of the water rose a girl. A plain, seemingly ordinary girl with striking eyes, though Alina knew the _sildroher_ must be ancient. There was something familiar about her that brough an ache to her chest. The girl had no idea why.

“Many people have sought me ought but in all my centuries I’ve never granted wishes for a living saint.” The sea witch spoke in a strange ancient cadence that sounded like something from another century. Or another era.

“Do you think I don’t know what happened to your abilities? I doubt right now you could summon a single sunbeam, let alone hope to fulfill your desire to become a living saint again.”

“I don’t want to be a saint. They always end up dead. What I want – no, _need_ – is to be whole again.”

The witch was silent.

“I can _feel_ a void inside me,” the girl told the witch her a story, one that she kept bottled up inside since the destruction of the Shadow Fold three years ago, “When I was a cartographer, I heard many stories from seasoned soldiers who’d lost their limbs to the _volcra_. They claimed there was a numbness, this phantom feeling of pain even though their limbs were long gone. That’s what it’s like for me.”

“You are not the only human that has suffered loss,” the witch’s voice was devoid of emotion, but her grey eyes softened.

“M – my husband was the only thing that kept me from falling into complete despair. Now he is dead, and I am once again alone in the world.”

The Sea Witch tells her she will restore her powers in exchange for all memories of her first love. The girl recoiled. After a long moment, she gave a single nod. The witch laughed.

“You think that if you just try hard enough that you will remember. That somehow you will find a way back to him.”

It was exactly what the girl had been thinking. Why did those words ring too familiar? She heard it long ago, her life as a living saint was like a memory from a dream.

_You would have the tracker exiled in a labor camp?_

_“Yes.”_

_You think that if he’s somehow alive, you’ll somehow find you way back to him._

“The water hears and understands,” the young sea witch continued, “but the ice does not forgive. You are on thin ice, girl. Unless you understand the consequences of your actions, I will not grant your wish.”

It was the greatest kindness the witch could have given her. If the girl understood the consequences of combining Morozova’s amplifiers, Ravka would still be a nation of darkness.

The _sildroher’s_ unusually gentle words made the girl think that a long time ago, the witch was a lonely girl too, with all the rage only lonely girls possess. She knew all the stories about the sea witch, it was practically part of the bargain. To sell part of your soul for a wish.

“Grisha are limited by the small science,” the girl had written down everything the old man told her on their last night together until it became memory. "It’s more for comfort than anything else. It was no wonder they chose to forget they could use science and _merzost._ It’s no wonder that magic and abomination are synonymous in Ravkan. Not surprising that ‘witch’ and ‘foreigner,’ _drusje_ and _drusil_ are similar Fjerdan. I used to believe that grisha were born and died, but grisha are born _and_ Made. They can die and be Unmade.”

The girl leaned forward the pool, “I have mourned my beloved the moment his heart stopped. I loved him, I miss him but if I had to choose between a childhood love and power for the ages…” she trailed off.

Had the girl not lost her power on the Shadow Fold, she would have never married and lived in a beautiful _dacha_ near Keramzin. She grieved everyday for her power, but to her late husband it was nothing more than lukewarm sympathy and an afterthought.

The witch’s kindness shattered the last of the girl’s self-control, and before she could stop herself, she was weeping uncontrollably against her palms. The girl’s hands muffled most of her sobs. The _sildroher_ looked away until the girl’s cries subsided into whimpers.

Alina Starkov steeled herself for the decision she had to make. “Lady of Kenst Hjerte, I accept your bargain. My memories of my first love in exchange to become an Etherealki with the ability to summon light just as I was able to do as a newborn grisha; before I gained Morozova’s amplifiers.” She said her words slowly, specifically, sedulously.

She couldn’t risk being turned into a living star.

Just because the witch said a few kind words didn’t mean she wasn’t capable of deception.

The witch’s lips twitched, as if she were suppressing a smile. “Then listen carefully. When you are ready say your beloved’s name, my spell will begin. Do not struggle. Do not resist. You must be willing.”

The girl nodded, trepidation rising. Inhale. Exhale.

Then – “Malyen Oretsev.”

“Please relax,” the witch whispered, “a name for a name. It’s only fair.” The _sildroher_ paused.

“I am Ulla.”

And then she kissed her.

Alina felt the vibrations of the song through Ulla’s lips. The sweet passion of first love. Tender protectiveness of a new romance. Betrayal of a former lover. Death of an aged loved one. Love was a contradiction in all ways and all things.

As their kiss deepened, Ulla pulled her into the pool.

At the first tease of Ulla’s tongue, Alina forgot his name.

When their bodies pressed together, Alina forgot his face.

When Ulla’s hand moved away from her face and to her hip and thigh, Alina remembered when she called her power for the first time.

As Ulla moved away from her lips and to her neck, Alina remembered being called _Sol Koroleva_ for the first time.

When Ulla reluctantly pulled away, the world went white. Then silence.

There was a call, and the light answered. It rushed in every direction, illuminating the pool, skimming over the ground, skittering over the pink skies of dusk.

Here was one thing that would belong to her and her alone, one thing that would never leave her again. She smiled and laughed and danced.

At last, the girl became herself again.


End file.
